[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, everyone. You've got questions and we've got answers. I'm Julia Boyes and this is BELA Asks.
The Business Ethics Leadership alliance, or BELA as we like to call it, is a community of organizations committing to maturing their ethics and compliance programs and strengthening their speak up cultures.
They do this by attending events, gaining resources and data and more.
Whereas we believe every organization can benefit from being a BELA member, we believe that there is no competition in compliance and we are not interested in gatekeeping best practices.
So we developed BELA Asks as part of the Ethicast podcast where we receive questions from BELLA members through their concierge service. They send questions and we're able to give curated space specific answers, unique to the questions that are coming in today. We are thrilled to be joined by Ethisphere's Chief Strategy Officer and the Executive Chair of BELA, Erica Salmon Byrne. Hi, Erica, it's so good to see you.
[00:01:09] Speaker B: Hi, Julia, it's great to see you. And I'm delighted to be back for yet another BELA Asks.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: Well, today we have a great question. As you know, they've been coming in and they're all wonderful.
[00:01:21] Speaker B: 2026 is a rocket as far as these questions are concerned.
[00:01:25] Speaker A: It's true.
Today our question is how should companies escalate investigations of ethics complaints when they involve an executive or a member of senior management?
[00:01:37] Speaker B: This is the thousand dollar question, Julia, that every compliance officer hopes they won't find themselves in a position where they have to deal with this issue. But we all know that it's a possibility that you will. And so there's a couple of thoughts that I have on this one. The first one is hopefully your investigations and escalation policy has made this easy for you to determine the right course of action in the moment because it's been set out in advance. So if you don't have a investigations and escalation policy, that is step number one. Because what you don't want to be doing is making this decision in the moment where there isn't clear guidance that you can point to. So that's, that is sort of task number one. If you are listening to the two of us and you think to yourself, I don't think we have an escalation protocol in our investigations policy. Go take care of that right now. Because you want that policy in place, you want that process in place before you have to use it. It's sort of like having a data breach practice, right? You don't want to figure out who's calling the CEO to tell them about the breach at 3 o' clock in the morning and at 3 o' clock in the morning after the breach has happened, Right. You want to figure out who is raising this issue. Who's, who's responsible for calling the audit chair? What are the facts that you need to have before you call the audit chair? Does every, you know, allegation involving a VP and above get escalated? Is it an SVP and above? Is it a certain type of issue gets escalated, but other kinds of issues don't, Right. Have that conversation well in advance and make sure that those things are set out in your policy. And if you don't have an escalation protocol in your policy at all right now, that's another thing to do, right? Take a look at your policy and figure out, okay, what, you know, what if, let's say you have a decentralized compliance function where you have a lot of vested investigation authority in your regions, what needs to get escalated to the global compliance team right away? What, what needs to be escalated as part of your monthly reporting numbers? What gets escalated as part of your quarterly reporting numbers? Right. All of those things are things you want to get in place early on so that they're tools that are available to your team so that they don't have to panic over this decision at the moment that it happens, right? That we have a process, we have a protocol, we're going to follow the protocol and that will give your investigators, who are naturally going to be upset and nervous about this, the ability to raise this issue because they're following a pre existing process.
So that is probably the very most important thing that you can do as a compliance officer to address this particular sticky situation.
The second thing I would say, and this is something that has come up in some of the reading that I have done on organizational justice, because that is one of the topics, as you know, Julia, you know, I spend a lot of time thinking and talking about, and we often talk about the courage it takes for an employee to raise their hand, but there's also the courage involved in a compliance officer appropriately escalating an issue in the face of pushback from senior business leaders. And so we, you know, we all know that this is a risk if there's an issue that has been raised about, you know, a particular senior executive. This is part of the reason why we have anonymous hotlines so that people can be comfortable raising things anonymously. But when that anonymous issue lands in the plate of the compliance team, those are some of the most challenging moments for a compliance officer to be Comfortable saying, we need to look into this issue. And the very best way that you can as a compliance professional, particularly if you're in a senior role, is to have that protocol, to have their back, to say, look, you are doing your job. Your job is this and I have your back at this moment in time. And that comes from the top. That needs to come from your audit committee, all of those pieces. But putting that process in place is the most important thing that you as a compliance team can do.
Yeah.
[00:05:45] Speaker A: Thank you, Erica. As a quick follow up question, once a company does have this policy in place, could you share maybe anecdotes of maybe things you've seen? How does this get escalated? Does it stay within the team, like what happens?
[00:06:02] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, so. So a good escalation protocol for situations like this is going to have very clear parameters for the type of the issue that gets escalated and the seniority of the person involved and who those things get escalated to. So let's say hypothetically speaking, you have a decentralized compliance function where you have investigation authority that is vested in the regions and you have an escalation protocol that says, okay, anything related to accounting fraud, anything that's related to anti corruption, and anything that's related to illegal discrimination involving a person of this seniority level or above gets investigated not in the region, but instead by the global compliance team. Because one of the things that can happen when you have regional investigation authority is you can have situations where people in the regions are going to feel nervous about investigating the head of the region or the SVP for sales for the region. Right. Whatever the case may be. So you want to make sure that you get the right investigation team in that is not potentially impacted by those fears of retaliation and those potential conflicts.
Similarly, you want to make sure that you are alerting the leadership team and if appropriate, under your escalation protocol, the oversight committee at the board level of the fact that this issue is happening. So for those of you who listen to Bill and I, Ethicast reacts on the Nestle CEO situation as an example. Right. That will what? That is exactly this.
The C. There were allegations about improper relationships, conflicts of interest.
Those issues were raised to the hotline anonymously. You know, team tries to investigate it ran into some challenges, escalated again, goes to the audit committee. Audit committee brings in people from the outside to do this investigation. That is often one of the things that would happen when you have a senior leader involved. Because internally, people, people are understandably nervous about retaliation if they're looking into an issue like this. So you need to have all of those escalation pieces in place so that you can make sure that you bring in the right kind of outside counsel to look into the appropriate issue, depending on what's going on.
And you don't want to be making those decisions in an ad hoc fashion. You want to be making those decisions according to the protocol that everyone in the non emergency moment. Right. It's much easier doing to agree to a protocol when that protocol is not being applied to you. So do it in advance, get it in your investigation policy, and then you have a process you can follow in the moment when you need it.
[00:08:25] Speaker A: Well, thank you, Erica. Hopefully this really encourages and edifies people that are working so hard to make this happen.
[00:08:34] Speaker B: My pleasure. And to all those Bella members out there, you guys came out of the gates really strong in 2026 with your Bella Ask questions, please keep them coming. This is one of the things that we love to be able to do for the community at writ large and something that we want to continue doing well into, not just 2026, but beyond. But we can't do that without your questions, so keep them coming.
[00:08:59] Speaker A: Yes. All right, thanks Erica. Great to see you.
[00:09:02] Speaker B: Likewise.
[00:09:03] Speaker A: If you want to hear more conversations like you heard today, subscribe to our YouTube channel or wherever you get your podcasts. And to find resources surrounding today's conversation, visit.
If you're interested in learning more about Abella membership, please write to us at
[email protected] but most importantly, like Erica just said, if you have questions for us, please send them. We want to answer them, we want to get you what you need, and we want to share this information with the community at large.
We're grateful for you and excited for 2026. This is Julia Boyes and this has been BELA Asks.
